Thursday, November 20, 2014

I still fail to understand the difference between httpd_can_network_connect_db and httpd_can_network_connect. Some people say the former allows connections to known database ports. My question are:

What are these ports? Where are the corresponding policy defined? I found many .pp files deeply under /etc/selinux, and I feel sorry that they are binary which are almost impossible to interpret, so where can I find the the source files for the compiled policy, and what is the language to define policies?

You could use the semanage command for how the booleans are described.

The command above reads in the policy and prints out what happens when you enable the httpd_can_network_connect_db boolean. We further restrict the search to see how it affects the httpd_t, apache, process type with the name_connect access. sesearch tells us that turning on httpd_can_network_connect_db would allow the httpd_t domain to connect to tcp ports labeled postgresql_port_t, mssql_port_t, oracle_port_t, mysqld_port_t, gds_db_port_t. You can use seinfo to turn these port types into port definitions. semanage port -l would also work.

The above command shows that httpd_can_network_connect allows httpd_t to connect to all tcp socket types that have the port_type attribute.

> seinfo -aport_type -x | wc -l
245

Using seinfo above would show you that port_type is the attribute of all port types, meaning that turning on the httpd_can_network_connect boolean, allows the httpd_t domain to connect to ALL tcp network ports.

Bottom Line httpd_can_network_connect_db allows httpd_t to connect to an additional 10 ports while httpd_can_network_connect adds thousands.